Core Policy
From PirateWiki
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The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:
Reform of copyright law
See: Copyright
The official aim of the copyright system since the Statute of Anne in 1709 has been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.
The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money fifty years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough.
All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free and unrestricted. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.
We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.
An abolished patent system
Patents are officially sanctioned monopolies on ideas. Large corporations diligently race to hold patents they can use against smaller competitors to prevent them from competing on equal terms.
Programming is merely applied maths, maths can't be patented. When a programmer writes software, they weave together thousands of ideas (algorithms or calculation rules) into a copyrighted work. Usually some of the ideas in the programmer's work will be new and non-obvious according to the standards of the patent system, and any of those ideas may have been independently thought of, and patented by someone else. See Google pagerank, or Amazon one-click shopping basket for examples. When many such ideas are patented it becomes impossible to write software without infringing on multiple patents, and small software developers, with no significant patent portfolio of their own, live under permanent threat of legal action by holders of large patent portfolios.
Under the influence of the patent system and big industry lobbyists, the New Zealand Government is on the verge of making a huge mistake: to pass a law (the Patents Bill 2009, which completely replaces the Patents Act 1953) that would legitimise software patents. The Pirate Party asserts that by allowing software patents, our local software industry will fall victim to patent trolls and unscrupulous extortionists. A cartel of large corporations will crush smaller competitors, and we will all pay more money for less good and less secure software. Without software patents New Zealand could save costs, foster innovation, enhance security, and create jobs.
Software development is happening 'despite' patents, not because of them. Even the big patent holders like Microsoft claim they are only getting patents to defend themselves through cross-licensing agreements.
Industrial and pharmaceutical patents also discourage innovation by many smaller firms and institutions, and discourage new enterprises from starting. If any of their innovations have been thought of before and patented, through no fault of their own, their investment will be seriously hurt. They must take account of this risk when they decide whether to invest money in innovation. This means there is less competition and less innovation overall.
The net effect for consumers and the public is less choice and higher prices than would be the case otherwise.
The Pirate Party of Sweden has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. See http://www.piratpartiet.se/an_alternative_to_pharmaceutical_patents
Respect for the right to privacy
Following the 9/11 event in the US, much of the developed world has allowed itself to be swept along in a panic reaction to try to end all evil by increasing the level of surveillance and control over the entire population.
We propose a general communications secrets act. Just as it is prohibited to read someone else's mail today, it shall be forbidden to read or access e-mail, SMS or other forms of messages, regardless of the underlying technology or who the operator may be.
We must pull the emergency brake on the runaway train towards a Big Brother society we do not want. Terrorists may attack the open society, but only governments can abolish it. The Pirate Party wants to prevent that from happening.
Core Policy originally taken from the Swedish Pirate Party and minimally adapted to the concerns of the New Zealand Pirate Party.
